According to data from the CDC, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, fentanyl is causing a record number of deaths of young people due to overdose, which has been increasing since the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the United States, fentanyl has caused a doubling of overdose deaths among young people ages 12 to 17 since the start of the Covid 19 pandemic, according to data from the CDC, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. . This situation mainly affects vulnerable populations that have difficulty accessing health services.
This worrying phenomenon is also analyzed by the RIA Institute, a Mexican organization dedicated to researching anti-drug policies. Sarah Snap is its director. She indicates that some of the causes of the increase in consumption are the lack of knowledge about this type of substance as well as the ease with which illegal groups can bring in said drugs.
“There is no knowledge among users about what substances they are receiving. This is a consequence of the ban. There is something called the ‘iron law of prohibition’, which makes illegal markets revolve around more powerful, more compact substances, with greater difficulty in identifying the substance by its smell, for example. The introduction of fentanyl to the opioid market in the United States is because it is a more powerful substance, more compact, easier to transport, and as a synthetic substance, it is easier to produce in the laboratory,” explains Snap.
There are two markets for fentanyl. The one for recreational consumption, which is illegal, and the legal one for medical purposes, produced “in legal laboratories and where fentanyl has been prescribed for decades,” recalls Sarah Snap.
The drug policy expert highlights that fentanyl overdoses occur mainly in adults, but that this increase in young people is a call to strengthen education on the subject. “Young people are going to experiment with drugs. This is real. It is even more urgent to improve education about legal drugs, illegal drugs, the risks, the effects and that we can base all of this on truth and evidence and not on fear, on stigma,” she concludes.
Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid drug, approximately 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin as a pain reliever. On the American continent it has a strong presence in Canada, the United States and northern Mexico.
